In this week’s Our Take: five-star celebrities are served canteen slop, Samsung offers therapy to help you switch, stylish accessories arrive for the apocalypse, and booksellers push back against a dystopian future.
A TASTE OF REALITY
The School Food Project and BBH London enlisted Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur Angela Hartnett, one of Britain’s most respected chefs, to front what appeared to be her latest restaurant opening. Diners arrived expecting the kind of fresh, high-quality food Hartnett has built her reputation on, only to be served processed chicken burgers, soggy chips and cold baked beans.
It’s the reality of what many children are eating at school every day.
It’s a brilliantly simple idea because it replaces statistics with experience. Rather than telling parents school food needs to improve, it invites them to experience the disappointment for themselves. The moment of realisation lands far harder than any report or campaign message ever could, prompting one simple question: if this isn’t good enough for adults, why should it be good enough for children?
This is exactly what great experiential marketing should do. It challenges assumptions, sparks conversation and makes an issue feel personal rather than distant. Simple, memorable and rooted in a genuinely important cause, it’s the kind of creative work that sticks with you long after the experience is over.
COUPLES THERAPY, SMARTPHONE STYLE
Breaking up is hard to do. These days, that apparently includes the tiny computer you’ve been sleeping beside for the past ten years.
Samsung’s new Switchers campaign takes aim at one of Apple’s greatest strengths: leaving can feel like admin, social exile and a minor identity crisis rolled into one. So, naturally, Samsung sent people to couples therapy.
Couples Therapy psychologist Dr Orna Guralnik sits down with real-life pairings to unpack the anxieties of moving from iPhone to Galaxy. Green bubbles. AirDrop. Years of photos. Data transfer. The sort of issues that sound embarrassingly trivial until someone threatens to change the family group chat.
There’s good behavioural thinking underneath the joke. Our phones have become infrastructure for relationships. Shared albums, FaceTime habits, chargers, group chats and years of muscle memory quietly make an ecosystem harder to leave. Samsung’s own figures suggest people are moving, too: it says 30% of Galaxy Z Flip8 buyers since launch have switched from competing smartphone brands.
Crucially, the campaign has a product answer waiting in the wings. Samsung’s Smart Switch tackles many of those practical fears by transferring photos, contacts, messages and other data across devices. The therapy gets the laugh; the technology removes the excuse.
It’s a useful reminder of how loyalty actually forms. Sometimes consumers stick around because they adore a brand. Sometimes changing just sounds like an absolute pain in the arse.
DOOMERISM IN CONSUMERISM
There is something deeply modern about preparing for climate collapse with an accessory that wouldn’t look out of place in Dover Street Market.
Created for New York Climate Week, Lifeline is an orange tote bag that transforms into a self-inflating life jacket in around 15 seconds. The idea came from images of flooding on the New York subway, turning a fairly ordinary commuter accessory into emergency equipment. Its creators call it an “essential that shouldn’t exist.”
Which is quite a sentence for a tote bag.
Elsewhere, designer So Young Song’s Welcome to Thistopia imagines a department store in 2077, where climate adaptation has become another aisle to browse. Artificial skin helps bodies cope with extreme heat. Waste is repackaged as luxury food. Survival arrives beautifully merchandised.
It taps into an increasingly strange relationship with climate anxiety. The future can feel enormous and abstract when expressed through degrees of warming or emissions targets. Put it on a shop floor, give it packaging and a price tag, and suddenly it becomes much harder to ignore.
There’s also something revealing in the fact that we imagine even catastrophe through consumption. Faced with an unknowable future, our instinct is apparently to ask what we’ll wear, eat and carry through it.
BUY BANNED BOOKS BEFORE THEY BURN
The irony of Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale sitting on a table telling us to read them before they’re “burnt” isn’t exactly subtle. But that’s why it works.
Barnes & Noble’s Park Slope store has gone all in on its “Read Before They Burn” display, featuring books that have been challenged, restricted or censored. Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby and The Color Purple also make the cut, alongside a quote from Stephen Chbosky: “Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen.”
The banned books section was first introduced to the Barnes & Noble website in 2022, but a recent TikTok has brought a small table in one of their bookstores onto people’s feeds, alluding to another Great Fire to Alexandria. Because if there’s one way to make people interested in something, it’s telling them they’re not allowed to see it.
“Read them before they burn” is dramatic, yes, but “buy these books because they’ve been challenged by a school board” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Whether intentional or not, banning a book is often the best marketing campaign it could ask for. The attempt to silence these stories has only amplified our curiosity about what they have to say and why we should keep reading them.